


The Skeptic and the Medium

by Vivien



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Haunted Houses, Mediums, Past Child Abuse, Repressed Memories, Self-Denial, Spooky, skeptics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-10-27 06:50:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20756132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vivien/pseuds/Vivien
Summary: Rey Niima fought for a logical, no-nonsense life as a scientist and skeptic of all things that go bump in the night. Kylo Ren is a famous medium for whom bumps in the night show off. So of course they have to make a Netflix special together.





	The Skeptic and the Medium

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to @crossingwinter and @politicalmamaduck who were my editors and cheerleaders. Thank you to all my mod sisters and the writers for this fabulous 2019 RFFA.

“No,” Rey Niima said, folding her arms across her chest. “Absolutely not, Poe.”

“Come on, Rey, this is the breakout opportunity you’ve been waiting for,” Poe cajoled.

“At what cost? I’m not working with- with him. Not for anything.”

Poe closed his eyes and took a breath. “I haven’t steered you wrong yet, have I? The podcast bookings? The PBS webisodes? The merchandising?

You’re making the leap from YouTube to mainstream media, and this will be perfect. If this Netflix special pans out, it could even be a series.”

“I’m _The Skeptic_,” she said with an exasperated sigh. “I’m a scientist. I’m not going to pander to that self-proclaimed ghost whisperer and his ridiculous fanbase. I’m just not. I built my reputation on debunking things that go bump in the night, not scripting nonsense jump scares in the dark.”

She was proud of the ordered and successful life she’d carved for herself since aging out of foster care. She’d left the chaos of her youth behind her, and she was going to be someone. She’d reach this goal logically, with careful planning, like she approached all things as an adult. Rey never drank more than a single glass of wine at a time, exercised regularly, and volunteered at a youth shelter in between her day job as a research assistant and her night and weekend work with her show. There was no time or place for dealing with foolishness.

Kylo Ren’s wildly popular show, _The Medium_, was nothing but foolishness. He put on this grim dark act of talking to things that weren’t there while items—no doubt on wires—zipped across the camera and strange noises flooded the empty rooms. He “read minds” and made a big show of “leading the spirits into the light” and once he did, the foolishness stopped. He carried himself with gravitas and purpose, like he was anything but the ne’er do well rich kid who had been featured in the tabloids ten years ago for outrageous behavior every time you turned around. She huffed in frustration.

She’d watched every episode of _The Medium_. Some of them she’d watched twice.

“Right, I hear you, and as your manager, I would never advise you to do something that in any way diminished your integrity. But the pitch is for no scripts, just an outline of stops in the abandoned hospital. You, him, two crew members, and one night. You both approve the final edit.”

Rey narrowed her eyes. “I want Finn and Rose.”

“One crew member of your choice, one of his.”

She shifted from one foot to the other, considering. The monetary offer for the special was a lot. A whole lot. Enough to finance the purchase of better equipment to prove that cold spots were the results of explainable temperature fluctuations, and light orbs captured on film technical glitches. Enough to pay her friends who so far had volunteered their time and effort for little more than beer and pizza. And she could travel more—go to the “most haunted” locations abroad to debunk a greater variety of myths and folklore.

She deserved this. She’d fought so hard to rise above the upbringing that tried to keep her down. She’d worked her ass off to get into college, and then she’d worked even harder to stay there. Rey was nothing if not persistent, and once she’d discovered the campus skeptics group, she honestly felt like she had found her calling. She had to prove that the nonsense others believed so easily was nothing but imagination that warped normal phenomena into something unnatural.

“One special,” she said, and then pursed her lips. “And it has to be _The Skeptic and the Medium_, not _The Medium and the Skeptic_.”

Poe rubbed his hands together, smiling. “I think we can make that work.”

⊂(´･◡･⊂ )∘˚˳°

Kylo Ren hadn’t deigned to show up for any of the production meetings. He avoided all but the most essential phone calls, and then responded in monosyllables. He sent his sleazy ginger manager and nervous legal staff in his stead to take care of business and hammer out the final details. Rey didn’t actually lay eyes upon him until filming day, and she was honestly okay with that.

“Ugh, he’s just as pretentious as I thought he’d be,” she whispered into her cameraman and best friend's ear as she watched Kylo leave the large production RV parked in front of the abandoned hospital. He was taller than she anticipated; on screen he seemed to take up less space than he did in person. His chest was broad, his build sturdy, and Rey had to admit he filled out his black cashmere sweater quite well.

Finn snickered, “I told you he was a piece of work, didn’t I?”

Rey rolled her eyes. “His layers of black have layers of black.”

She snapped her expression into one of professional civility, and as soon as he was close enough, she extended her right hand. “Hi there, Rey Niima,” she said. “This is my camera man, Finn Storm.”

Kylo kept his gloved hands down at his sides, hesitating before reaching out to shake hers. “Pleased to meet you. My sound tech, Phasma, will be here momentarily.”

Finn couldn’t hide his initial grimace, but he tried to cover it up with an enthusiastic tumble of words.. “Phasma…Great. It’ll be great working with her again.”

“Will it?” Kylo asked with a slightly raised eyebrow.

Rey tried to be subtle as she wiped her hand on her pants; a leather handshake felt pretty creepy. From the way Kylo’s eyes flicked to her from Finn, it wasn’t subtle at all. She smiled, probably a little too widely, and said, “This will be an interesting night. I can’t wait to see what you have in store for me.”

“What do you mean, Ms. Niima?” Kylo asked, and Rey couldn’t help but notice how his gloved hands clenched into tight fists.

“Well, you know,” she babbled, wishing she hadn’t opened her big mouth. “What’s been rigged. Scripted. I mean, I know in the contract it says just you, me, and two crew walking through this place and staying the night, but I’ve watched your show, and there have to be some good scares, right?”

“There is nothing rigged or scripted about my show,” he said.

“Nothing?” Rey couldn't help the scoff that escaped her lips.

“Nothing. What happens truly happens. I look forward to your explanations. I’ve never been able to identify any.”

Rey’s mouth worked and Finn coughed, looking down at his shoes. “But— you have to make it up. Ghosts aren’t real. So called paranormal phenomena can always be explained.”

He shrugged. “As I said, I look forward to your findings.” He nodded in the direction of the tall woman with platinum hair brandishing a boom mike.

“Oh, and by the way?” Kylo leaned into her personal space, his breath tickling her ear. “What happened with the woman in white with the pink flower in her hair when you were six was real, too.”

Rey’s eyes opened wide and she looked to Finn right as Phasma caught up to the party. “Shall we?” said the tall blonde, boom mike at the ready. Kylo opened the door for Phasma and, presumably, for the rest of them. Finn gripped Rey’s hand in his and pretty much pulled her across the threshold.

“Are you okay?” he asked, setting down his camera bag to unpack. He grinned, not able to resist what came next. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Rey thwacked him on the arm and stared at the man in black across the deserted lobby. How had he known? No one knew about that. Maybe the social worker wrote it down in her case file, but if so, how the hell did he get his hands on it?

_ The lady took her hand and led her down the road away from the burning car. She didn’t talk, but Rey knew it was safe to go with her, especially since Mommy and Daddy were sleeping in the car and wouldn’t wake up. The friends she met like the lady were always friendly even if they talked too much and asked her weird questions._

She’d only been six when her mom and dad died in that car crash, from which she escaped unscathed. While she might have mentioned a mysterious lady walking her down the road to safety to wait for the helpers to come, she was pretty damn sure she hadn’t mentioned the pale pink flower in the lady’s shadowed hair.

But then again, Kylo Ren had started life as Ben Solo, the Senator’s son, and she imagined he had plenty of friends in high places who could provide him obscure case files to feed his “visions.” She narrowed her eyes and glared at him.

His face remained expressionless as his eyes caught hers and held them. Rey felt a chill shiver up her spine. Above their heads, a thumping noise sounded twice. Kylo looked up.

“Already?” said Phasma, checking the sound levels on her portable gear. “That’s a record. Usually they wait until we’re moving around.”  
Finn shouldered his camera and began filming.

“Buckle in,” Kylo said, unsmiling. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

⊂(´･◡･⊂ )∘˚˳°

By 10:15 p.m. they had walked through the kitchen and dining hall, dust thick on the industrial mixer bowl and chairs tossed askew. Rey felt very strange. She put it down to nerves and explained away the rustling sounds as squirrels or rats in the walls. Kylo was quiet. He nodded when she found reasons for things and merely replied with a polite, “If you say so, Ms. Niima,” or something similar.

But in the stairway down to the morgue, she saw something. It was white and blurry and flashed quickly in the corner of her eye and then was gone. She took out the industrial flashlight and examined every inch of the area for wires or mirrors or anything that would explain the vision. Meanwhile, Kylo removed the glove from one hand and placed it against the wall, closing his eyes. Rey glanced at him in the halo of light and noticed how large his hands were, how plush his lips.

“Oh,” he breathed. “Oh, I see.”

Rey frowned and stepped closer. There wasn’t much room on the stairs and she brushed against him as he dropped his hand from the wall. Her hand pressed a moment against his, and she was overcome with a wave of nausea. He grabbed her hand as she sagged forward, weak in the knees all of a sudden, and they locked eyes there in the dark as the nausea was replaced by the strangest feeling of electricity.

_When she was eleven, her foster parents had banished her to her room several nights in a row after they caught her levitating rocks for the other children’s amusement. She didn’t know how she lifted the rocks into the air with nothing but her mind, and the foster parents insisted she was lying, that she’d used some kind of assistance, and dirty liars had no place in their home and she’d best watch out._

Rey shook her head and breathed deeply. She yanked her hand from his and stood. “It’s easily explainable,” she said into the camera, and she began talking about angles and mirrors and how an obscure ray of light could trick visual perception in the dark.

Kylo watched her, his eyes dark and sad, and pulled the glove back on.

⊂(´･◡･⊂ )∘˚˳°

It was 1:30 a.m. and Rey could not hold back her tears as she crawled through the ventilation duct. There was nothing here but dust and rat droppings, and she was probably going to contract the Hantavirus and look like a fool in this bloody special. She’d scrambled up here to catch Ren’s team in the act, but there was nothing. No evidence of planted audio equipment, not even evidence of the dust being disturbed by anyone but herself and some rodents during the last fifteen years. This occurred all evening as they progressed through the decaying hallways, and as flashes of memories flooded into Rey’s once calm brain.

_When she was too young to remember her own age, she’d had a friend in the house her parents rented. She was a little girl, too, and she said her name was Sally. No one could see her but Rey. They played with dolls and giggled all afternoon. When the family moved to their next home, Sally waved goodbye from the porch. Rey looked away, and when she looked back, Sally wasn’t there._

Rey had always known too much, seen things others couldn’t, been able to do things no one could explain. It was part of the chaos of her turbulent childhood that she’d so gladly left behind. She’d repressed these memories, and many more, to live a normal adult life that she’d once thought she could never have.

_When she was seven, an old man in funny clothes had approached her on the school playground. __“You can see me,” he said, relief in his wavering voice. She’d nodded her head, frowning, and he covered his hands with his face. “Where is Cordelia? I need to find her and tell her I was wrong. I’ve been so lost for so long.”_

_Rey tried to explain to the man that she didn’t know any Cordelia and she wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers. The other children saw her talking to thin air, and, since children are cruel, began to mock her. She walked away from the strange man and ignored him, no matter how he cried and begged._

She felt sick. It was like she had cramps, but all over, and not just in her pelvic area. It was like—

_When she got drunk at that party her freshman year and was almost immediately surrounded by desperate spirits clamoring for her attention. She’d thrown up in the middle of the living room from the fear, and while the hosts took it in stride, Rey never talked to them again. She also never drank more than a single drink from that point forward. She even avoided muscle relaxers, much less harder drugs, because if she relaxed, if she let herself slip, if the chaos uprooted the order she’d maintained since that day, that day when—_

As she crawled backwards to the open ceiling panel, the sobs ripped from her chest. She was ugly crying, great. Just great.

_When she was fifteen, when she stood in her attic room, her butt and the back of her thighs on fire with welts from her foster mother’s belt, she visualized slamming a door closed so that she would never see anything strange again, so no mysterious knocking in the night would be blamed on her, so no chairs would rearrange themselves in the kitchen and her guardians would feel the need to ‘beat the devil out of her’._

Kylo Ren stood directly below the panel, his hand outstretched to her. She took it, creepy glove and all, and jumped down, frantically wiping at her face to get her shit under control.

“Are you okay, Peanut?” The light was off on Finn’s camera, and it pointed down. He was huddled against the wall, well and truly freaked out. They had never experienced phenomena like this. Not once. Phasma stood beside him as if on guard.

_When she was five, she asked her mother about her grandmother, and why she was so angry sitting in the living room. Rey told her that she was yelling ‘I know about the ring, I know what you did.’ Her mother quailed as she took a long pull of her beer and slapped Rey, telling her to shut the hell up. Rey did._

Kylo didn’t let go of her hand. “Let’s take a break,” he said, his voice low and calm. “All of us. Let’s go outside for some fresh air.”  
A screech which cut off as abruptly as it began sounded from a room down the hall. Both Rey and Finn startled. Kylo walked briskly towards the exit with Phasma taking the rear, herding Finn and Rey along.

Once they were outside under the moonlight, hot cocoa from the production RV in Rey’s shaking hands, Kylo sat next to her. “When did you cut off your perceptions?”

Goosebumps rippled on her arms. She brought the paper cup to her lips and sipped. “What, you can’t read my mind and answer for me?” she asked, her tone flat.

“Well, I could. But that would be really rude. I try not to do that kind of thing anymore.”

She side-eyed him.

“Not often, anyway,” he corrected with a slight quirk of his lips.

“When I was 15. Weird things had always happened to me, and I saw- I saw things no one else could see. There was a poltergeist. It got to be too much. I just- I stopped. I couldn’t see them anymore and stay sane.”

Kylo nodded. “Yeah, I get that. You’re untrained, but more powerful than you know.”

“I promised myself I wouldn’t see things, hear words that weren’t spoken from that day forward.”

“And you didn’t. Haven’t you wondered why you’ve never experienced anything that couldn’t easily been explained when you’ve visited the same places where spirits have been crawling out of the woodwork for me?”

She shook her head. “It was- Science explained-“

“You didn’t experience phenomena to debunk because you wouldn’t let yourself perceive it.” At some point his arm had draped around her shoulders, warming her against the chill of the wee hours. “You lived your truth. Until tonight, when you had no choice but to live mine. And rediscover yours.”

Her face crumpled and she pressed her face into his shoulder, fresh tears surging forth. She was ruined. Her life, her reputation as a scientist, everything she’d done since she was a frightened girl who saw things no one else could see and lifted rocks without touching them was for nothing.

“No, that’s not true,” he assured her, holding her closer. “I’m not trying to read your mind, but your projection is a little overpowering right now. Rey, I can’t believe how strong you’ve been all this time. I was raised knowing about my perceptions and powers, trained to use them, and it nearly broke me. To think you’ve been all this time without a teacher…”

“I’m going to look like such a fool,” she sniffled.

“What, for the special? Absolutely not,” he assured her. “We’re going to find some things for you to explain away, because there always are. You and I perceive differently than regular people. There are paranormal explanations and scientific ones in pretty much any haunting I’ve come across.”

She wiped her face with her sleeve and took another shaky sip of cocoa. “Why didn’t you meet with me beforehand? Talk to me about this?”

He paused, and when he spoke, she snorted out a laugh. “I was too scared.”

“You see dead people. All the time. How could you have been scared of me?”

“Uh, pretty easily. Have you met you? You’re terrifying. Besides, would you have believed me? Would you even have considered the possibility of what I needed to tell you?”

She took a deep breath and shook her head no once more.

“We’re going to do more of these specials, together, you know. You’re brilliant, Rey. You know exactly what to look for and how to find it and scientifically document it—you’ve just never let yourself experience the phenomenon to document. Don’t you see? Together we’ll be able to examine things like no one else has ever been able to do.”

Rey reached for his hand, tugging at the glove’s edge. He stripped it off; she paused before she slipped her hand into his. Their bare skin pressing together, she stared into his eyes as the electricity built between them once again. She caught glimpses of him as a small boy, leading the dead into the light, saw his gangly teenaged form raging against a world that didn’t understand him. And she saw all the spirits around them, some placid, some lost and confused, and she reached out with her mind to feel the world of the living and the dead, the thoughts of the people surrounding her, and the energy that connected all these things together.

For the first time in a long time she felt whole. She shivered and he pulled her closer. Something soft and comforting that felt like his lips pressed against her hair for a moment and then was gone, just like the apparition on the stairway.

“Did you know this was going to happen?” she asked him.

“Yeah, well, I might have insisted that Netflix include you. I’ve had visions of you since, oh, pretty much forever.” He gave her a half smile that was like nothing she’d seen on the dour man’s face before. It warmed the energy around him and she shivered again, but not from the cold.

She grasped his hand and exhaled. “Okay,” she said, and this felt right. Scary but right. As they stood, she glanced up and caught the face of a child in a hospital gown staring out the window. It raised a pale hand and waved. Rey waved back.

The End ⊂(´･◡･⊂ )∘˚˳° Boo!

**Author's Note:**

> My mom once admitted that she could see dead people. She never wanted to. She was very much one for a no-nonsense life and refused to let any ghost funny business slow her down. She was really good at ignoring what was in front of her. 
> 
> She was also pretty sure that the "imaginary friend" she had when she was a little girl was a spirit and not an imaginary friend. Her name was Sally, and she appears to Rey in this story.


End file.
